Posts by jaycee331

Keep calm and carry on

Still happy with Nord and their client is one of the slickest out there. But more importantly, thanks to their TV advertising campaigns they are now a household name that will be quite rightly subjected to this kind of scrutiny. I'll take that in preference over any smaller, lesser known VPN provider whose security is still hiding in the shadows.

If my account was compromised here then some lucky hacker has in their hands my false name, disposable email address (disposed) and a Bitpay/bitcoin payment receipt. #opsec

Better

When you have to shoehorn terms like "better" into a project title you already know it's going to be an unmitigated disaster.

Shame we don't have any similar rules in the UK

Upvote if you're also in a hands-on techy role and sufficiently good at it to be aligned onto a management pay-scale that strips off overtime entitlement.

I fear that this investigation has the same level of credibility as asking Jimmy Saville and Gary Glitter to look into whether Rolf Harris has ever done anything inappropriate.

Fight Back

For any of you familiar with the basic principles of the data protection act, please humour this theory.

1] Any UK co. I do business with as a statutory duty of care to protect my PII

2] I have no legal relationship with Equifax, so they’re not accountable to me. But any company I have a relationship with, who shares my data with Equifax, are.

3] Equifax have categorically been proven not to be competent and secure data processor

4] As a UK citizen, my data had no business being visible through a US website

So what would happen if I write to all my bank and utilities stating that they are in default breach of the DPA and I prohibit them from sharing any more of my data with Equifax.

Should they continue to do so, they are in further breach of the DPA to continue to expose my data to a third party that is no longer trustworthy or competent.

A further angle would be anyone wanted to switch suppliers and get out of contract early, could they claim breach of contract and walk – contract voided by the supplier because they have failed in their implied or explicit duty of care under the DPA.

Wishful thinking???

I'll chance it....

I trust Kaspersky more than any US owned product subject to secret court orders for tampering.

Bye EE

Just the reminder I needed to move my personal and business mobiles to a new provider.

Because I wouldn't give BT the steam off my piss*

*Unless where forced to indirectly, via their virtual-honestly-not-a-monopoly-guv.

Found a workaround

So I opted in for BT Public Wi-Fi sharing whilst traveling in London.

Which of course, in return, they sent a remote command to the Home Hub to enable my own router to become another public hotspot on their share and share alike principle.

Wouldn't have minded so much but without some crappy BT IOS/Android custom apps, when I got back home my devices were now signing into the speed limited BT Openzone SSID in my own bloomin' home. Don't want that at all, nor the RF pollution.

Checked the Home Hub and it's a greyed out setting, can only be changed by our BT overlords via what has to be a remote control backdoor of some shape or form.

Thankfully I have a shelf of spare routers. Replaced with Home Hub with <anything>.

Win Win. BT still think I'm opted-in, and I can still use public WiFi. Up yours BT!

Can't quite figure this one

Some other news sources suggest this isn't really a DDOS. A possible case of Sony just standing up a bunch of aws instances to join the torrent swarms leaching the leaked archives and seeding them with junk content. Making the files ultimately impossible to retrieve in original form. Possibly using a modified client to fake the hash value. Or something like that ;)

Change for changes sake

That's all.

Give it up

BYOD is an epic fail on so many levels. TCO, security, management and as yet never tested in a court of law - legal liabilities.

The only folk I see pushing it are tin and software shifters as a way to shift more tin and software, and the market "consultants" on their payroll to tell the world what a great idea it is.

What started off as :

1] it saves money - no more expensive business smartphones

ended as, as well, you need 3 software layers to make it safe and manage it, it's only £xx per device to license. Plus the support costs of losing all economies of scale in needing a support a multitude of handsets and OS's.

2] it empowers the work force being able to able to use their own favourite devices

ended as, after we've enforced group security policies onto your daily personal use handset, adding on extra apps for sand boxing, threaten you with remote wipe, force all web traffic through a corporate filter and proxy, insist you connect via VPN, the real proposition is to destroy the usability of your favourite personal device

It doesn't need more debate, study, policy discussion. It just needs flushing back down the shit filled toilet that the idea came from in the first place. And we all know what really prompted this BYOD concept. The VIPs who bought their shiny first gen iPads on expenses then moaned their tits off that they couldn't use it in the workplace. Diddums.

Alternatively...

"However technically proficient they may be, not all IT experts find self-promotion and the articulation of their own strengths particularly easy. Unless people master such skills, though, career progression could suffer"

OR there are some of us with too much self-pride and integrity to play that game. I'm entirely happy to flat-line where I'm at. I can walk out each day with my head held high knowing I did a quality days work and didn't have to spin lie and play BS bingo to do it. There's more to life than money, especially when further progression means being soaked in the stench of vacuous corporate speak, incompetence, games and politics and having to essentially lie for a living. No ta.

Why does corporate speak even exist? To enable talentless seniors to create the illusion of competence by talking the talk. Why do politics in the workplace exist? Because mistakes need covering up, poor decision making needs spinning and burying, empire builders need dealing with, and the conflicts of territorial unit targets due to flawed organizational structures. IMHO.

BYOD?

Am I the only one thinking that it's still way too early for BYOD to start blaming that as a significant factor?

Oh Look...

Yet another tough hand of justice dished out from the ICO to a public body and public purse.

But if a private business is involved in a data offence, they get away with blaming it on a rogue employee or third party, receive big hug from the ICO and "guidance" to ensure it doesn't happen again.

They overpayed, should be £0* :-)

As per "http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/" I am more interested in the alleged 16 counts of Data Protection Act violations inherent in their service framework. Or the fact that they went on public record stating that they will not honour the lawful 40 day response time for Subject Access Requests if the volume of requests is too high. I don't believe the DPA makes any provision for such excuses?

So in other words, if they cannot operate lawfully within the boundaries of UK/EU Law, they should not exist. Unfortunately we have seen the Irish Data Commissioner only issue "non binding recommendations" - nice to see the usual “one rule for big business, one rule for everyone else” principles of the regulators is alive and well.

So in terms of their accounts and tax, I offer an interpretation that they're not that dishonest after all. Because I would give their European operations a valuation of £0 because if they are non-compliant with the laws in those territories, with any justice could/should be shutdown at any time. And as for their growing user base, well I don't know a single person who doesn't have at least 1 fake FB profile. *yes this is tongue in cheek, to make the point.

Wi-Fi is flakey

I think people are failing to consider why Wi-Fi may not be supported yet.

Do we need a brief lesson in Wifi?

So the most common is 801.g 54Mb. That 54Mb isn't per connected device, it's shared across all connected devices. It's a half-duplex medium also meaning you can half that figure straight away. The highest rate any one device can achieve in the real world is around 20Mb. And that's assuming that Wifi is 100% clean and not also being shared with your Xbox, PC, Tablet, Smartphone etc for any serious use at the same time.

Now remember there are only 3 non-overlapping WiFi channels, yet in my street that are about 8 AP's in range. Every other AP on the same channel as mine eats into that shared 54mb of radio space even more. And that's without even considering high error correction overheads to co-exist in the same space as others.

Sure 20Mb is going to be fine for standard def streaming, but it's getting close for HD. WiFi is inherently an un-assured technology and subject to all kinds of operating conditions and interference.

It's well known that in the age of 40mb and 80Mb FTTC broadband, 802.1g 54Mb Wifi is now a bottleneck.

None of these issues occur on a 100Mb piece of Ethernet cable connected to a full duplex switch port.

Based on that, it occurs to me that YouView do not yet wish to risk having their brand tarnished by floods of support calls about chopping and buffering video etc because the end user has a poor WiFi setup. Even if they sent an engineer out to optimise everything, there is nothing to stop a neighbour standing up a new AP the very next day on the same channel wiping out that finely tuned setup.

As for Wireless N-150 or N-300 these are indeed a solution. Unfortunately for me I upgraded my router and several devices to Wireless N last year and for the life in me I cannot get anything to connect above 54Mb. I'm not sure if it's due to vendor mix of not quite standards compliant devices or that it's because I'm using the 2.4Ghz Wireless N so presumably there is simply not enough channel space left in there after all the other AP's in the neighbourhood have taken their slice.

Or, I as tried in vain to explain to my employer about 10 years ago when they started rolling out WiFi as some kind of utopia, you cannot guaranete thin air, and without very expensive tools you can't troubleshoot it either.

To be fair...

I've seen at least two iPhone's where it's actually the glass like rear cover that has shattered like glass, not the screen itself. Which has yelled out to me "bad design", because that decision has increased the probability of leaving the consumer with a smashed phone by 100%.

Of course I'm not saying that's sufficient to make a court case from. Ultimately the judge is right. If you drop fragile things, they break, durrrrrrrh. But it does beg the questions -

Why intentonally make a product which is twice as likely to "smash" on an impact

Why buy something so expensive that is easier to damage than alternatives that have rubberised backs or easily replaceable rear battery covers. Though I guess if you haven't it with your own eyes, you're unlikely to know.

And with a bit of luck....

They may even go bankrupt, taking their service and all their customer's data with them.

Whilst I take no pleasure in wishing that on their loyal employees, a long, hard lesson about the rank stupidy of cloud services needs to be learned.

I wish I could be bothered....

But I'm not. Await feedback. Await SP1. Deploy.

YouView vs Windows Media Centre + TunerfreeMCE

.................................................................................................................. YV.....MCE/TF

A common front end user interface for ALL UK TV catch up services...... 1......... 1

The ability to do the above since 2008...................................................... 0......... 1

The ability to take your chances with WiFi connection............................. 0......... 1

Not have viewing habits data-mined for behavioural advertising............. 0......... 1

Choice of Freeview HD or Freesat HD for primary broadcast content..... 0......... 1

Freeview and Freesat carry on working if broadband is down................... ?......... 1

The ability to access US IPTV services over VPN................................... 0........ 1

The ability to purchase VOD content....................................................... 1......... 0

Ease of use for the technically challenged............................................... 1......... 0

So in short, I've already been enjoying the majority benefits of the YouView service for 4+ years thanks to a mini-PC under the telly. The question now is price. If YV STP's stick to the rumoured £300 ballpark, the challenge is to build a legit Win7 PC to go under the telly for a similar cost and I'm quietly confident that is achieveable. Sure I'll lose out of the premium subscription content, but I'm a freetard and wouldn't be buying any anyway. If I did fancy a Lovefilm or Netflix subscription, my TV has support for both integrated anyway.

The only thing I can see YV succeeding on is if they carry BT's new Premier League channel and it isn't wholesaled to other platforms - a killer app. But that's about it. How's the YV business model work anyway? Ok, there'll be a comission on any PayTV content, but the take up on the pay-for-extras remains to be proven, as BT already found out to their cost having first launched BT Vision as a subscription-free service, hoping that people would buy some premium VOD. Presumably they didn't given BT Vision changed to a monthly subscription model. A one off STB purchase isn't going to perpetually fund the infrastructure behind the service, so I have a running theory that YV will attempt to inject personalised advertising into your otherwise free and unfettered UK TV catchup viewing for a recurring profit, and charge the user £300 for the priviledge! No thanks!

VP Of Hardware Engineering?

He should be so proud. Like that "really cool" engineering that gave us the grip of death antenna.

!=Outsourcing best practice

No better example of failing to consider the golden rule "do not outsource a function that is critical to your core business". Like a banks mainframe perhaps...

Deja Vu?

Haven't we heard all this before in the hyping of previous OS releases?

I'm sure they tried telling us previously that Vista was more secure, then Win7...

Yawn.

ooooh shock

The ICO lands another hefty fine on a public service organisation, presumably taking money away from front line service and back to the treasury.

Yet all the while, if a private company whom commits a data offense, the ICO's stance is softly softly, work with them to help them follow the guidlines and a token pocket change fine if we're lucky.

It's about time the NHS learned to deploy the "actions of a single rogue employee" defence which get's you completely off the hook, or at least it does for a private company.

So I implore all El Reg readers here, follow the pattern of how the ICO exercises it's powers against public sector vs private and you'll see this is true.

All the while the ICO is still considering its position of Google's national WiFi slurp data rape. They failed to investigate, took Google's word for it at every stage, and then only thanks to the US FCC actually knowing how to investigate something, the ICO are left looking more weak and incompetent than words can justify.

Respect

Massive Kudos to IBM for being one of the first in this hyperbole rich industry for seeing through this nonsense and appreciating that cloudy services, and consumerism I.T. are not things that a company with the first clue about information security should be buying into.

BYOD isn’t about saving money, or being employee friendly. Never has been, never will be. The whole thing obviously started when the VIP’s, who bought their shiny iPad’s on expenses, then went bitching to their IT dept’s like spoilt children as they realised they can’t do anything useful with it in terms of corporate productivity. Could have told them that before they bought it one to be honest. Idiots.

Is it just me who thinks 100% IP TV is scarey?

My largest concern is availability.

Is there anyone on here who can claim knowledge of a DTT transmission fault that caused loss of reception for days and days? I certainly haven't.

But I, as I suspect many others, can identify with long periods of flakey broadband or length outages due to cable theft incidents etc. 5 days on my last one, and to think they that may one day be my primary source of TV too - this is in some way progress?

Jury still out != Denier

This is why the debate has become so rotten. You have to either be a believer or a denier.

I am neither, I'm just waiting for irrefutable evidence that demonstrates climate science has been able to successfully model the chaos theory of our ecosystem. I am yet to see any report that fits that criteria and doubt we will for many years.

I would suggest it is those who have already made their made up based on incomplete evidence that need therapy... well no, not therapy actually, just an education in the concept of critical reasoning and a grounding that all you are told to believe is not always true, , especially when it's coming from vested interests.